Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull stubbornly clung to power on Thursday as senior ministers deserted him, saying he would hold a second leadership vote on Friday only if he received a letter signed by the majority of the ruling Liberal party.

Police in the northern Chinese city of Linfen have arrested three people for spreading “untrue information” about local efforts to cut smog, highlighting growing sensitivity about the social and economic disruptions brought about by the country’s four-year “war on pollution”.

India minister Arun Jaitley will resume charge of the finance and corporate affairs ministry on Thursday after a gap of more than three months following a kidney transplant surgery, a government statement said.

Company that helps manufacture U.S. citizens drivers licenses brags of “building and managing databases of entire populations” across the globe.

Big Tech has gathered unprecedented amounts of personal data from millions of people. At the same time, a system of total surveillance has been constructed: Facial recognition, biometric scanning, cell phone surveillance and more have amassed a huge amount of information.

We see the stories about the growing surveillance state, but we don’t hear about the gigantic multinational corporation that is helping to build the physical infrastructure supporting it.

Idemia (formerly Morpho), is a billion dollar multinational corporation. It is responsible for building a significant portion of the world’s biometric surveillance and security systems, operating in about 70 countries. Some American clients of the company include the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the FBI.

The company website says that Morpho has been “…building and managing databases of entire populations…” for many years.

Morpho has been building and managing databases of entire populations for governments, law enforcement agencies and other government bodies around the world, whether for national ID, health cards, bank cards or even driver license programs.

The company is now pushing digital license trials in the U.S. Delaware and Iowa are among five states involved in the trials this year. With the mobile license, law enforcement will be able to wirelessly “ping” a drivers smartphone for their license. The move is part of a wider trend toward cashless payment.

Idemia is assisting China and India with building surveillance and ID systems, trafficking in huge amounts of biometric data across the world.

In China, Idemia has helped build the massive biometric scanning and surveillance system that is used to keep Chinese citizens under a tyrannical boot.

The company has provided biometric payment and authentication systems to the country.

“With a sales office in Hong Kong, Morpho offers services and solutions in the field of digital identity and smart transactions. The world leader in multibiometric identification technologies, Morpho supplies biometric identification systems to Chinese police forces and government immigration agencies.

In India, the controversial Aadhaar national ID card system is also enjoying the support of Idemia through Safran Identity & Security, now part of Idemia. The company states that it is “in charge of all technological aspects of Aadhaar”.

Morpho is one of the companies chosen to take part in an unprecedented program called Aadhaar to count everyone residing in India and then assign each person a unique identification number. Morpho is in charge of all technological aspects of Aadhaar.

The social credit trap

One of the court filings (Mathew Thomas vs Union of India) details the rise of China’s social credit system, comparing the Indian Aadhaar initiative to the Chinese program.

The Chinese government initially permitted corporations to aggregate personal data of their customers and built algorithms that could then rate the worth of these customers. As such applications began to get integrated and large technology companies began to dominate every aspect of citizen lives, the ‘Social Credit Rating Systems’ that these companies ran became all the more pervasive.

Once this system had taken hold of the entire country, the State Council of the Central Government in China released an Outline of the Social Credit System Construction Plan(2014-2020), which specifies that such Social Credit Rating Systems would be integrated into their governance by 2020. This represents the integration of such infrastructure into the central architecture of the State, and would ensure a devastating amount of State control over its citizens.

A disturbingly similar pattern is being followed in the United States. Big Tech (Google, Apple, Facebook) has already gathered most of our personal data. It has also absorbed around 90% of Internet traffic, and is now openly allying with communist Chinese policies.

Between Idemia issuing digital drivers licenses to U.S. citizens and Big Tech’s data collection, we are inches away from a fully integrated national ID system and an accompanying social credit score.

At the moment, the United States does not have a government-backed program like the Chinese. However, if gone unchecked, a de facto social credit system could still take hold due to the pervasiveness of big tech influence.

Idemia is building the infrastructure of the massive world-wide biometric surveillance grid. Demand for “convenience” with wireless, cardless, cashless payment and shopping is driving us right into their hands.